Hierarchical Storage

So far all my attempts at keeping collected information accessable have run out of hard drive space. Even with that in abundance having a home folder in the tens of gigabytes makes starting a new backup set prohibitively time consuming.

Software for digital asset management has for years allowed you to load images off onto optical media, just keeping thumbnails. You can even edit meta data of “offline” images. Or selectively bring some back online and photoshop them. A week later you insert the CD, burn a new one (make that two copies) with all changes, and throw the older disc away.

If EF had some of this power…

I can certainly see how this would be useful, but I currently have no plans to add this type of support for offline files to EagleFiler. You could, however, take whole EagleFiler libraries offline and use a utility such as CDFinder to catalog them so that you can search and browse thumbnails.

Thanks for the hint, but CDFinder can’t index any of the meta EagleFiler uses, except for the Finder label, and that’s slooow.

The whole thing really stands and falls with selectively bringing stuff online. If I copy one file out of an old library I get issues with synchronisation and (incremental) backups. Copying whole libraries every time means no space is saved.

(I’ve used CDF for years, unfortunately its GUI is very ugly and imho got actually less useable in the v5 modernization. Much less fun than EF :wink:

Yeah, CDFinder isn’t ideal, but I’ve yet to find anything better. It should be able to index the tags if you set EagleFiler to copy them to the Spotlight comments and tell CDFinder to index the comments. For the other metadata you’re out of luck, unless you want to keep local copies of EagleFiler’s metadata plists around.